Southeast Asian Student Association

News Posts

Aung San Suu Kyi, known primarily as a symbol of freedom, progress, and democracy among the Burmese will have quite the mountain to climb looking ahead to the possibility of her ascending to Presidency in 2015. She has been seen as a fighter for the rights of the multi-ethnic Myanmar and a seeker of autonomy amongst all the people for whom Myanmar is home. But the population grows in diversity seemingly everyday and with it comes a growing divide amongst the people that has persisted ever ...

In Malaysia, a pivotal general election looms closer as the Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition looks to seize power away from the Democratic Action Party. The DAP swept through the 2008 elections through its use of popular social media and its greater appeal to the youth and ethnically Chinese Malaysians that inhabit over 40% of the country.
Realizing this trend and knowing that their stranglehold over more traditional forms of media will not secure victory, the BN coalition looked to hir...

Under current work is a 3.5 km railway that will be able to carry full scale freight trains by what plans are calling a 2015 date. This is in the wake of mutual decisions by both countries to ramp up their bilateral trade by an estimated 8 billion dollars. This project was initially supposed to start in 2011 but delays have kept it from progressing forward.
The railway itself it already has been in place since 1994 extending from Nong Khai to the Mekong river in Laos but used mainly fo...

Abu Sayyaf, a militant group linked with al-Qaida, were attacked by Muslim rebels linked with the Moro National Liberation Front earlier this week. The group was reportedly holding Philippine hostages that they refused to return which, in turn, sparked the violence. This will go down as the first reported violent confrontation between these two insurgent groups whom have coexisted for a number of years without such bloodshed being a factor.
Official reports leave 22 men dead in the con...

Norodom Sihanouk was cremated in an elaborate ceremony today in capital city Phenom Penh. Millions of Cambodians were estimated to have been in attendance to grieve and honor the charismatic leader thought by many as the father of modern Cambodia. For almost seven decades after his initial crowning in 1941, Sihanouk helped control the political side of Cambodia taking on such roles as monarch, prince, head of state, prime minister, head of the Khmer Rouge government, chairman of the post-c...